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Conversation Solo Shows

Nancy Bowen: Language, the female body, traditional craft, and history

In connection with “Nancy Bowen: From A to Z and the Bodies In Between,” her solo exhibition at NUNU Fine Art, Two Coats of Paint arranged a conversation between Bowen and psychoanalyst-artist Laurence Hegarty about her practice. Approaching her work with an “artist-archaeologist” mindset, Bowen finds materials reassembles them into objects that challenge established narratives about language, the female body, traditional craft, and history. She indulges playfulness and unconscious impulses, letting social and political themes emerge in due course.

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Gallery news Gallery shows

Hannah Studnick: A practice of persistence

Contributed by Lucas Moran / In early March, when another gallery seemed to disappear every few days, I opened Instagram to find Hannah Studnick’s dashboard confessional announcing that Ruby/Dakota was closing its doors. The speech wasn’t prewritten or staged – just a heartfelt message delivered from a dreary highway drive, the kind we take to mull things over, digest where our lives are headed, and reassess. Hannah turned the camera on herself, as she often does, and let the world in on who she was and what she was going through. Vulnerability isn’t unusual on Instagram, but it is in a gallerist.

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Gallery Guides Hudson Valley & Vicinity Gallery Guide

Hudson Valley (+ Vicinity) Selected Gallery Guide, July 2026

Contributed by Karlyn Benson / The art scene was buzzing in June for Upstate Art Weekend, and it’s not slowing down in July. New exhibitions are opening throughout the month, starting on July 4 with  Todd Stong: This World May Never Change at Headstone. On July 11, notable openings include Jason Middlebrook at LABspace, Reginald Madison at SEPTEMBER, Holly McCabe at Distortion Society, Going Upstate: The Avery Family in New York at the Kleinert/James Center for the Arts, and CANTILEVERS: Katy Fischer and Marie Lorenz at Roundabouts Now. If you are interested in collage, don’t miss the series of ten exhibitions organized by Transforming Collage: Hudson Valley, including Uncollage – Seamless Unison at Dutchess Community College; Shapeshifters: Collage to Form at Palmer Gallery, Vassar College; PLACE / MEANT at Millbrook Arts Project; and more. Finally, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the United States, One Mile Gallery in Kingston presents A Complicated Union: Art & Protest at America’s 250th Anniversary with a reception on July 18.

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Gallery shows Upstate Art Weekend

Idyll and crisis at The Re Institute

Contributed by Lawre Stone / The Re Institute – a dairy barn built in the 1960s that Henry Klimowicz has repurposed as rustic art gallery – seems to arise sublimely out of nowhere, exuding the freedom and wonder of the open road. Presently installed on the ground floor is “Seven Women Chase Icebergs” – paintings, drawings, and works on paper by seven women convened by Brenda Zlamany for a residency at Pouch Cove in northern Newfoundland in spring 2025 to respond to the remote landscape. The thrill of yielding to an unknown environment permeates the exhibition.

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Books

The Artist’s Soul: The Sorrows of Young Werther

Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / Two Coats of Paint Press recently published a limited edition of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s semi-autobiographical, epistolary novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). I discovered the book when I was in my early thirties and ever since it’s lived in my brain. It’s among the first books to probe the inchoate longings of artists, and a powerful exploration of the subjective side of the artistic personality. I’ve met very few artists who have heard of it, let alone read it, so it surprised me to learn that a fellow artist had recently discovered it and published a special edition with a dedication reading, “To all the artists who have ever lived and worked in New York City.” Despite having been written more than two-and-a-half centuries ago, Werther raises provocative questions for artists working today. 

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Solo Shows Upstate Art Weekend

David Fix, Jr.’s existential retrenchment

Contributed by Bill Arning / Comments at openings such as, “I just can’t look at another painting by a hot young artist showing off a dreamy life in Fire Island Pines” are all too familiar – “hot” referring to both the bronzed, gym-sculpted bodies on display and the artists’ meteoric careers. The field has become crowded enough that it now seems nearly impossible for a young gay painter, even one emerging from a prestigious MFA program, to develop a genuinely distinctive visual language. That is why David Fix, Jr.’s first solo exhibition, “The Cusp of Magic” at The Fireplace Project, is such a welcome surprise.

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Solo Shows Upstate Art Weekend

Peter Acheson: The edge of composure

Contributed by David Whelan / Peter Acheson’s paintings and sculptures live on the edge of composure through seemingly dashed-off operations, loose frameworks, and blurred boundaries. By making artwork with such a loose grip on solidity, Acheson invites us to step away from the known towards an enchanting oblivion. The title “Fifty Miles” comes from poet Gary Snyder’s response to the question of how famous he wanted to be: “Fifty miles seems about right”. Fifty miles is a human scale – not the span of global art fairs or finance but that of friendship, shared resources, and habitat. It is also roughly the distance between the gallery and the artist’s studio, which put a smile on my face. The show is curated by Teffia Primary and hosted at Maiden Lane Gallery, an old two-story building full of oddball characteristics. The space is connected to the local YWCA, whose preschool playground can be seen from the second-floor window, reminding us we are in a space of growth and play.

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Group Shows Two Coats Sponsor

A visual paean to New York at A Space

Contributed by Mary Sargent / John Berger declared that every image embodies a way of seeing, and the way that images gathered in “Amongst Other Things,” a recent group exhibition at A Space, embody is slow, sustained, and irreducibly human. The premise of the show was simple and deliberately unfashionable: to depict the landscape of New York through direct, on-site observation. Each of the twenty artists’ works channels a span of looking that may have taken hours, in the manner of artists such as Lois Dodd, Rackstraw Downes, and David Hockney, who spent decades exploring and refining it. As they record their surroundings in paint, the canvases accumulate memories and feelings.

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Solo Shows

Molly Rose Lieberman’s resonant work

Contributed by Leslie Roberts / During a recent tour of downtown galleries, I saw several consecutive shows presenting tightly programmed bodies of work. In exhibit after exhibit, the pieces were uniform in size, homogeneous in strategy, and made of standardized, highly finished components. Even some strong exhibits felt overly glossy, suffused with a commodified quality. Molly Rose Lieberman’s “The Candles Are on the Table,” at Theta Gallery, was a welcome relief. Each painting and sculpture has a particular format and resolution that the artist appears to have arrived at in the making.

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Gallery shows Opinion Quick Study

Art and the adolescent impulse

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / There’s a plausible argument that American culture is in a state of arrested development, ever bending back to a kind of national adolescence born of a persistent self-image of fledgling prodigy. Leslie Fiedler made the case as to literature at mid-century with Love and Death in the American Novel, insisting on the sober maturity of European letters in light of imperial decline and epochal devastation against the exceptionalist puerility of American fiction. Becca Rothfeld deftly rehabilitates and contextualizes this point of view in a recent New Yorker piece, landing it on a hortatory if plangent note: “Perhaps now that we are standing amid the ruins of the East Wing and the wreckage of the post-war liberal order – now that we, too, occupy and uncomfortable interregnum between two social formations – we will find it in ourselves to put away childish things and write something new.” Assuming this contention has some validity, is contemporary American art similarly retrogressive?

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Solo Shows

Kenneth Noland: Generative force and visual dynamism

Contributed by Alex Grimley / In the 1972 documentary Painters Painting, Kenneth Noland is asked by director Emile de Antonio, “What does ‘color field painting’ mean?” The plainspoken artist thinks for a second before answering, “What they generally mean, I think, is that the painting is mostly generated by color, rather than, say, drawing or any other means.” Noland’s matter-of-fact response is indicative of his feeling about such terminology. Labels coined in the 1960s like “color field painting” and “post-painterly abstraction” – “a fairly awkward term,” he remarked – circumscribed his art, categorizing it alongside that of painters like Helen Frankenthaler and Jules Olitski, artists whose aims increasingly diverged from Noland’s. “Kenneth Noland: From Center to Edge,” currently on view at Hunter Dunbar Projects, is a concentrated presentation that illustrates the considerable range of the artist’s practice over four decades, from the 1960s to the early 2000s. 

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Group Shows

Harsh Collective: Forlorn eyes

Contributed by Will Maddoxx / “Thief of Joy,” Harsh Collective’s first show at its new location on the Lower East Side, brings together three emerging Gen-Z painters who explore contemporary anxieties about identity and self-image. Shows like this can feel confined to the present moment, but this one offers sufficient nuance to escape the trap. 

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Museum Exhibitions

Raphael’s innovations and influence

Contributed by Margarett McCann / The sophisticated visual storytelling of Raffaello Sanzio (1483-1520) is emphasized in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Raphael: Sublime Poetry. Figure and architectural drawings, collaborations in printmaking, tapestry, and a quarter of his painting oeuvre are accompanied by precedents he imitated and peers whose progress he surpassed. Portrait of a Young Woman with a Unicorn shows Raphael’s seamless meld of real and ideal, solid and delicate, old and new. Gothic simplicity, medieval symbolism, and Flemish detail elegantly cohere with luminous chiaroscuro, perspective, and neoclassical plasticity.

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Solo Shows

Angelo Vasta: Comfort in darkness 

Contributed by Alessandrio Teoldi / Angelo Vasta’s exhibition “Luci Spente” (Lights Off) at Tappeto Volante in Tribeca centers on a simple gesture: turning down the light. Not removing it, not rejecting color, but softening its intensity. For an artist whose visual language has often featured bright, vibrant palettes, this is a bold shift of deliberate subtraction.

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Solo Shows

Amorelle Jacox’s spiritual science

Contributed by William Corwin / Depictions of spirits and monsters are often combinations of the diagrammatic and the visceral: attributes packaged in an erotic or terrifying container. Amorelle Jacox’s luminous female presences in “Mothers of Time,” now on view at Management, are unassuming and recessive beings peering out between throbbing bands of color and eerie cones of light. She populates her large-scale canvases with measurement devices – rulers, color wheels, and sundry visual and geometric rubrics that guide the viewer’s interpretation of the powers invested in each of the goddesses or muses she has invented. 

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Gallery shows NYC Gallery Guide

NYC Selected Gallery Guide, June 2026

Contributed by Sharon Butler / In June, in the wake of an exhausting month of fairs, NYC galleries are again presenting a full slate of exhibitions. At Field of Play, look for a survey of paintings by Lee Sherry (1947–2012). She had close ties with the Language Poets and was part of an avant-garde painting circle in Soho but never gained wide recognition. If old reconfigured texts and quirky materials that subvert narratives…

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Solo Shows

David Humphrey: The hiker

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / David Humphrey has accustomed his audience to acerbically penetrating representational paintings in which witty riffs resolve into considered pronouncements about the world. His 2022 painting Art Shipping – depicting a van about to bring a painting of a misogynistic act of torture from the artist’s serenely rustic home to a presumptively hermetic white-cube gallery – is a fine example of his unsparing fusion of introspection and worldly scrutiny. Whereas such trenchant paintings – and there are many – reflect Humphrey’s fully crystallized ideas, the work in “anecdote,” his current show mainly of drawings at Kate Werble Gallery, captures a number of them in intermediate stages, offering graphic insight into his thought processes. 

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